Campus rape reports outweigh arrests 43 to 1

Editor’s note: Because 97.8 percent of rape offenders were male in 2005, this series of stories will frequently refer to victims as female. We recognize there are instances in which men are victims of rape as well. Source: Bureau of Justice Statistics Mallory Deckard was an IU freshman living in Eigenmann when she reported she was raped. He wasn’t a stranger. She hadn’t been drinking.

It was the end of Christmas break, but few other students had arrived back at IU. A friend from home – someone she said she once trusted – asked if he could come up and visit. She agreed, but soon she said he began telling her he wanted to be her boyfriend. He became angry when she refused, saying she was happy with her current boyfriend, she said. He then forced himself on top of her, eventually raping her, she said.

It has been a four-year struggle for Deckard, now a senior.

“It didn’t come into my mind, ‘Hey this is rape. He could be prosecuted for this,’” she said. “I threw away my bedsheets, my clothes. I just wanted to get it all out of my mind.”

Deckard’s is one of 43 rapes that were reported to the IU Police Department since 2002. Of those 43 reports, one arrest was made. Rapes often go unpunished because it’s difficult for authorities to prove an offender used force. Despite efforts by several campus organizations to educate and prevent rape on IU’s campus, rape continues to occur every year, with no sign that current efforts will stop the problem.

“If you just look at it statistically it looks like we are just sitting on our hands doing nothing, and that is not the case,” IU Police Department Sgt. Leslie Slone said last year. Slone often works directly with rape victims by taking down the initial report and providing them options to prosecute their perpetrators.

But for women seeking justice, the process of getting from the police station to the courtroom is far from a simple one. Many roadblocks bar the cases from being convincing enough that Monroe County Prosecutor Chris Gaal will accept them and take them to court. However, much of the decision-making for this process relies on the victim’s compliance, Slone said.

“The decision-making process starts with the victim,” she said. “It begins with their decision to report or not to report.”

Coming forward

At its most basic level, arrests cannot be made without women reporting. Though all of IU’s resources seem to encourage victims to report a rape, none require women to report if they don’t want to. Still, different organizations have different focuses when speaking with a victim on reporting to police. It is a philosophy that first supports the victim, then seeks justice.

Middle Way House, a shelter for victims of sexual and physical abuse, often tends to victims immediately after the crime’s occurrence. Victims of this crime should never be blamed or judged, said Elizabeth Hannibal, crisis intervention services coordinator at Middle Way House.

“It places a huge burden on a victim to tell them that they need to report because it’s a threat to somebody else,” she said.

Where Middle Way House focuses more on tending to the victim’s needs, IUPD is focused on “catching the bad guy,” Slone said.

“We’re dealing with the same issue but coming at it from completely different worlds,” Slone said.

And for many women traumatized by the crime, coming forward is a shameful process, with fears of retaliation from their perpetrators often lingering, Hannibal said.

“We can’t force women to report,” she said. “If the evidence is there and (IUPD) can carry this forth without her, they can do that.”

The police make the decision to take a case to the county prosecutor, something they are legally allowed to do with or without the victim’s support. Slone said though IUPD can legally override a victim’s decision, they rarely choose to proceed without the victim’s consent unless the accused rapist is considered an immediate threat to others.

“Importance is relative,” Slone said. “It might be important to me as a police officer to throw him in jail. But at what cost? At further aggravating the victim?”

Like rape support organizations, IUPD leaves any decision to prosecute in the victim’s hands. Without the victim’s support, it is nearly impossible to prove guilt, said Carol McCord, assistant dean in the Office for Women’s Affairs.

Participating in an evidentiary exam following a rape becomes a crucial step for women wanting to move their cases along through the system, Slone said. What often happens, she said, is the people at the hospital doing the rape kit or medical exam will emphasize to victims they don’t have to speak with the police. If police don’t even know the crime occurred, they cannot do anything about it.

Beyond the report

Once women do come forward and report, the next issue police face is having enough proof to take the case to court. The main reason so few men are arrested lies with the difficulty of proving force in a courtroom, Slone said.

Force can be physical or verbal, but physical is most common. Physical force can include slipping a victim drugs or blocking a doorway.

Though proving force is a difficult task, it’s often complicated by the fact that victims might already be engaging in a “mutually agreeable” activity such as kissing.

Collecting evidence remains another problem in attempting to prosecute. Police often don’t find out about the crime until much later, Slone said, losing the timely opportunity to collect physical evidence, often bodily fluids. After about 72 hours, that evidence deteriorates, she said, making it nearly impossible to prove.

Slone emphasized that women can have the evidence taken at the hospital, which is referred to as a rape kit, without actually reporting the crime to the police. By putting that evidence in what she refers to as the “evidence refrigerator,” victims can take their time to decide if they want to press charges. Without physical evidence, Slone said, the case becomes a “he said, she said” issue.

“Many cases that we see, the women do not want to go so far as to go to court with it,” Slone said. “To point the finger and say ‘You did this thing to me.’ It’s really difficult. Particularly if they know the guy may serve prison time. ... Are they going to bring this guy to prison for X amount of years based on her word?”